Friday, August 24, 2012

review: more than you know by penny vincenzi

More Than You Know is about Eliza, Eliza’s brother Charles,
Charles’s acquaintance from National Service Matt, and Matt’s sister Scarlett
along with all their various family, friends, lovers, and coworkers.Yes, there really are that many characters
(the hardcover version has a cast of characters of nearly three pages at the
front of the book) in a novel primarily about Eliza.Much of the 585 pages could have been cut if
the focus had stayed on Eliza who was my only real interest anyway.Her story of going against familial and
societal expectations by embarking on a career and marrying a man not of her
social class was far more interesting than the many tangents about the lives of
Charles and Scarlett.Those subplots had
no bearing on the main plot.Due to all
these expendable characters and Penny Vincenzi’s frequent use of pronouns, the
story could sometimes be hard to follow, especially since I was listening to
the audio version.

About the narrator:The
fact that Rosalyn Landor is British (like most of the characters) really set
the scene. She also made it easy to
tell if the speaker was male or female, but it was difficult to tell which male
and which female at times.